til we come face to face
by sapphireswimming
Summary: UnDeadwood (A Critical Role Mini-Series). Major spoilers for Episode 4. "Brings up an interestin' point," Sharpe had said, punctuating the words with a gloved finger in Aloysius' direction. "Survival. That I can understand."


**Set in (and major spoilers for) UnDeadwood episode 4. **

**Title from the musical Les Miserables song _Stars_**

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**til we come face to face**

November 24, 2019

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"Brings up an interestin' point," Sharpe had said, punctuating the words with a gloved finger in his direction. "Survival. That I can understand."

And Aloysius could too.

Survival was a way of life out here in the west – the only way of life, really. Not much else mattered this far into the Dakota hills, where they were days' ride from any city of note, weeks from anything that might properly be considered civilization.

The grasp of the law was tenuous at best.

Anything was fair game, so long as you could get away with it. It's the reason Cy Tolliver had been able to establish such a lucrative business here in Deadwood, dealing in any number of firearms under a barroom table. How E.B. Farnham could proclaim himself mayor and somehow procure dozens of plots of nearby land without anyone in town becoming the wiser. Why Al Swearengen was so worried by the prospect of unidentified parties digging where there wasn't any gold that he'd hired the strangest assortment of folks Aloysius had ever had the pleasure of seeing doing business together.

It's the reason why anyone on the run from the law, anyone with a personal history they'd rather leave behind, came west.

Without any real law to speak of – only as much as the local sheriffs were capable of taking on, just enough to keep the semblance of peace – fistfights would break out in saloons and spill out onto the main thoroughfare as gunfights nearly every afternoon.

It didn't so much matter if you were in the right, so long as you could fight your way out of a tough spot. Some greenhorn with the devil's own luck might live to see the next sunrise while the toughest sonnuvabitch in the county could get taken out in the crossfire of another man's drunken dispute and never even see it coming.

Men would die in the street every day without anyone so much as batting an eye.

So you did what you had to in order to survive and, for men like them, for men like Aloysius and Sharpe, that meant always keeping your coat open, your trigger finger near your gun. It meant growing eyes on the back of your head so you could keep tabs on every other patron in a saloon, believing beyond the shadow of a doubt there were eyes on you when the hair started standing up on the back of your neck. It meant instinctively understanding when the mood of the room had shifted, had turned from a friendly game of Blackjack to something more dangerous, something that meant a man was liable to end up with a knife pinning his hand to the table. And not hesitating to act when your gut told you it was high time to move on to the next place. Or, at the very least, to get out of town.

Seemed like as soon as you'd slipped out of one close shave, there was another one waiting just around the corner, ready to shave you even closer. And that meant that any advantage you could lay hold of might just be the difference between living and dying – you had to grasp it with both hands and hang on for dear life.

Didn't matter much whose extended arm you reached for, trying to claw your way out of a pit filled with the charred corpses of men and demon snakes, or who watched your back in a gunfight against the undead so long as someone did.

And if it meant betting a piece of their own souls to be able to emerge from the shadows, fists blazing with unholy power, well, it was all worth it in the end if they lived to get there, now, wasn't it?

Aloysius had survived so much already – his childhood as a slave on the plantation with the merciless sun beating down on their backs as they bent over endless rows of crops, picking over the stalks until their fingers bled. His time in the war before he'd found his chance to slip away unnoticed into the fog. That bloody, awful war that turned blue and grey woolen uniforms alike into masses of dull, matted red as shots rang out from every direction and the screams of the dying grew louder, then softer, then stilled. The years since, after he'd remade himself into Aloysius Fogg, a bounty hunter who could track down anyone, no matter how many false personas they'd shed as they fled further and further west.

Given how much keeping yourself to yourself could extend your life expectancy in this half of the country, it was no wonder that men could reinvent themselves so easily, hiding for months and years at a time without ever being caught.

And that's what had brought Aloysius to Deadwood.

These fugitives had done their best to run from the law, each and every one of them committing any number of heinous crimes in order to stay free, to stay alive. Just like Sharpe had done, since he'd disappeared nearly fifteen years and who knew how many lives before. Amos Kinsley had begun with one murder to his name, but had ratcheted up his body count to untold quantities ever since, killing everyone who'd dared come close enough to sniff him out. No one had been able to so much as touch him, despite the ever increasing bounty on his head.

Survival.

It was something they both understood well, a language they spoke fluently.

But now they've reached something of an impasse, because now that he knows exactly who Clayton "The Coffin" Sharpe is, there's no way he can just let him walk out of here. The things they've been through together don't do a single thing to change the fact that he's the murderer he's been sent here to find.

The others don't understand when he cocks his revolver and holds it against Sharpe's head, but the outlaw does, and, once it becomes clear that there's no talking his way out of this one, simply asks for one more whiskey before they settle things once and for all.

Aloysius agrees, but doesn't lower his gun.

The last drink of a condemned man is Sharpe's by right, and a part of him can even allow that he's earned it, after everything. This is the only concession he can make, but there's nothing he can do to stop the rest of it, no matter what Arabella tries to argue, or the Reverend has to say, or how passionately Miss Miriam pleads for them to stop this.

This is justice. And it's been a long time coming.

Years of laying low, remaking himself in one town after another, even if he's used his skills as a gun-for-hire to protect the interests of others, doesn't erase any of the things Sharpe has done in the past. Innocent lives have been taken and that's something he'll have to answer for.

It brings Aloysius no pleasure to be the one to do it, but he has a job to do.

Sharpe finishes his drink, clinking the glass against the polished wooden counter before slowly pushing up from the barstool and moving toward the door. Aloysius follows, limping slightly, and with the snakebite still throbbing with every pulsing heartbeat, but the gun in his had does not waver as they walk out of the saloon.

He keeps it trained on Sharpe as they all file through the door.

They leave the others behind them on the porch of the Gem, silently pacing off their steps and then turning to face each other once they've taken up their positions.

The air is cool and the otherwise deserted street is silent, bereft of the usual nighttime noises. There are no hooting owls or howling coyotes, and even the wind seems to have stilled. It's as if the town itself understands, as they do, as the others didn't, why only one of them will walk away after this fight.

The next few minutes will decide which of them it will be - the man who's never stopped running or the man who can track down anyone.

Aloysius watches warily, eyes fixed on Sharpe's but alert to every whisper of movement: the slightest twitch of his gloved fingers, the soft flutter of his coat, the determined set of his boot as he shifts his weight.

He pays no mind to anything else, not the way Arabella and Miriam cling to each other, horrified, or the way the Reverend's clutching his cross to his chest.

Survival.

He knows that Sharpe understands just as clearly as he does that they won't both survive this – can't. Knows that in the blink of an eye, only one of them will still be standing.

Aloysius watches, hardly daring to blink as the bright light of the nearly full moon bathes the street in a softer glow than lamps hanging from the nearby establishments.

A shadow passes overhead.

He breathes in deeply.

And between the inhale and the exhale, something changes, shifts. In an instant, Aloysius is reaching for his gun, pulling it free from his holster, and shooting.

The shot goes wide, but he can be forgiven for that. Neither of them are at their best tonight.

He absorbs the recoil and turns back in time for Sharpe to hit him in the chest. Not in the heart – a couple inches to the left, buried in the soft muscle near his arm. He recoils from the impact but the bullet wound barely even stings. It's not a fatal shot.

Not fatal, from mere yards away.

Not fatal, from the best sharpshooter in the Badlands.

Not fatal, from the man who said that he could understand survival when everything else in their lives had been turned higgledy-piggledy with the introduction of snake-like creatures and The Dealer offering magic that coursed through their veins with a supernatural light.

Aloysius stares at him, eyes glittering hard in the lamplight, and moves to fire again.

Sharpe reacts with almost unnatural speed, managing to get his shot off first, but it goes so wide that the bullet buries itself in the building behind him, splintering one of the wooden steps with a sharp crack.

And then Aloysius slams back the hammer and squeezes of a shot of his own.

It hits Sharpe right in the gut.

He staggers back for a step, and then another, but somehow manages to stay upright. He stares at him for a long moment, ragged breathing harshly breaking through the silence around them.

They're both hurting – badly – but they know that this won't truly be over until one of them goes down.

Sharpe tremulously raises his gun. He aims so obviously for his gun hand that it's the work of a moment to pull it away to avoid the shot.

Aloysius breathes evenly as he steps back into place, cocks his revolver, and raises it again. He returns fire and his shot rings true, flying straight into the heart of the outlaw.

Sharpe falls backwards, crumpling into the dust of the street. He stares up at him for a moment as the blood begins to blossom on his chest, soaking through the layers of his dark clothing as it joins the growing stain just below it.

And then he smiles.

It's ironic, unsurprised. His teeth are coated in blood.

Aloysius ignores the desperate cries of the others as he watches the blood trickle out of the corner of his mouth, watches it pool beneath his chest.

Sharpe doesn't even try to say anything before the spark of life begins to fade from his eyes.

Slowly, Aloysius limps forward.

Survival, huh?

This coming from a man who'd only drawn his gun because Aloysius had held one to his head first. Who hadn't shot at him with the intention to kill, aiming for his hand instead of his heart not once but _twice_, even though he knew full well what that would mean, what the only other outcome could be.

He crouches down beside the body and reaches out a gloved hand to close his blankly staring eyes.

It was an interestin' point indeed.


End file.
